Dead for the Money (8 page)

“Seamus!”

“Hush!” He was thinking furiously. They had to enter a host within seconds of their arrival or return to the ship. But if they jumped to this girl, she might let go of her precarious hold, reacting to fear and physics. Within seconds of arrival, he had to make a critical decision.

The girl made it for him. As lightly as a mountain goat, she pulled herself back from the edge, vaulted the fence, and landed directly in front of them. Once she landed, facing them, her eyes opened wide in disbelief. She saw them, or at least saw something her brain did not know how to interpret.

“Jump!” He told Mildred, and they propelled themselves toward the girl. She stumbled forward a step, caught herself, and muttered something like, “Shit!” Immediately, she replaced the word. “I mean, shoot! What was that?”

“She saw us,” Mildred said. The girl shook her head. “She’s Brodie, isn’t she? What if she tells someone?”

“Hush!”

Instead of obeying, as she had promised to do, Mildred spoke in clear distinct tones. “Brodie, don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right.”

If Seamus had had teeth, they would have clenched. He should have gone with his instincts. Within ten seconds, Mildred had demonstrated that she was everything she had insisted she was not: talkative, meddlesome, and completely unwilling to follow orders.

B
RODIE
HAD
ESCAPED
again to the viewing point after funeral plans were explained. Funeral—the word itself was awful. There would be people, emotion, ceremony, all the things she hated. But it would be for Gramps, so she would tolerate it.

She hung from the fence rail, staring down at the trees and water below, until she was dizzy.
I’d better be careful, or I’ll fall,
she thought with a grim smile. Was that what she was hoping, that the fence would give or her hands would tire, and she would plunge to her death like Gramps did? She imagined the feeling of falling through the air. Would it be freeing to not have to hold on to anything ever again? Death might not be so bad if she and Gramps were reunited. If only a person knew what it was like to be dead, she could decide if that’s what she wanted. Not knowing made the decision so tough.

Not that life offered a lot of prospects. She had nobody left. With Gramps gone, someone else, probably Bud, would take over as her guardian. Where would she end up? Scarlet was important to her, but Bud might decide she was old enough to be on her own and send Scarlet packing to save the estate’s money.

This morning he had been pretty nice, but it was obvious he had no idea what to say to her. Arnold the Mouth had tried to help, but he was as clueless as Bud. He kept asking Brodie if she was all right, which had to be the dumbest question ever. She listened for a while, learned that the funeral would be tomorrow, and escaped before Arlis started in again on her visit to the mortuary. Arlis had insisted on choosing the casket, the flowers, the music, and the readings from scripture. Bud had seemed relieved to let her deal with those things, but Brodie knew Arlis had done it for herself, the way she did everything.

“I made all the arrangements,” she would tell the guests. “After all, he was my brother.”

And your meal ticket
, Brodie would have added if she ever spoke in Arlis’ presence.

She had watched Bud, trying to figure him out. He was everyone’s meal ticket now, even hers. As trustee, Bud had control of Brodie’s life for the next five years. She didn’t know him well, but she knew there was little chance that he liked her.

For one thing, she had been a real pain as a kid, playing dumb, sometimes horrible, pranks on people. Bud had been the recipient of a few of them—not that many, she tried to tell herself. He had lived with Gramps when she first came, but their age difference kept them from interacting much. Bud had been into cars and girls at the high school, not half-wild three-year-olds with the table manners of an orangutan. He had ignored Brodie whenever possible. Then he went off to college, becoming one of the people who visited from time to time and had to be avoided.

When she asked about Bud’s parents, Gramps had been truthful but not forthcoming. “My son did not marry well,” was all he said. “When he died, I thought it best that Bud live with me.”

“You rescued him, like you rescued me?”

He smiled. “Something like that.” Brodie pictured Gramps, swooping down like an avenging angel on Bud’s mother and taking the child home with him.

So Bud had been unwanted, like Brodie. But unlike her, Bud was useful and normal. Gramps’ charity cases had come out fifty-fifty: one worthwhile, one not so much.

A funny moaning sound came from behind her, but she could not turn from her present position to see what it was. It had to be wind in the pines, but it was kind of creepy. At the same time, her arms began to ache from the strain of holding onto the fence rail. Admitting that she was not going to do the right thing and off herself, she jumped back over the fence. As her feet hit the ground on the safe side of the fence, Brodie saw something in front of her. It was nebulous—no,
they
were nebulous: two misty shapes that looked vaguely human.

Then they were gone. A wave of nausea hit her like a punch in the gut. She staggered under the weight of it, put one hand to her head, the other to her stomach. A few seconds later, a second phantom punch sent her staggering to one side. Her stomach turned queasy, like the time she’d eaten a whole loaf of uncooked bread dough. Her head filled with the sound of swarming bees. She did not understand any of Mildred’s assurance that everything was going to be all right. In fact, for Brodie, everything felt even worse than it had before.

E
NTRY
HAD
BEEN
DIFFICULT
, and Seamus paused to regroup. His worst fears had manifested in one place and time. Their first attempt had been repelled by the girl’s essence, a mix of hormones, misfiring axons, and some sort of cellular rebellion. Like a prize fighter on the ropes, Seamus had had to shake his metaphorical head and reconnoiter. Their prospective host was off-balance from the first attempt. “Again!” he ordered Mildred, and they had tried a second time. Although it felt like they would be shot backward again, the girl’s body gave way at the last second, and they were inside.

Seamus had been relieved until Mildred started yapping. “Shut up!” He had never in his life spoken so loudly inside a waking host’s head. Still, he’d had to get his point across to this trainee who was already breaking the rules.

To his relief, Mildred did as ordered now, although she, too, might have been too exhausted to speak. The girl they now both inhabited seemed totally disoriented for a while, but gradually her heartbeat returned to normal and she stopped massaging her forehead. Their host would be fine, and it irked him that Mildred had made him lose his temper.
Not like me at all,
Seamus thought, but at least they were in. Mildred was silent. He hoped she was cowed by his disapproval.

There was a span of a few seconds where only the lap of waves could be heard. Seamus shuddered when the girl formed the first thought he could comprehend.
Crazy,
she said to herself
. I really am crazy.

Her name was Brodie, and she was the child Dunbar had spoken of, the one he’d rescued from some horrible situation. Seamus saw right away that she would not be a useful host.

The girl was odd. He had been inside a lot of heads, but he had never felt more resistance. It was what cross-backs called the Curse of the Teenage Girl. Young women just into puberty were notoriously bad hosts. In fact, they were lucky to have gotten into this girl’s head at all. Other cross-backs told stories of bouncing off young females and having to flounder back to their original host. Things got upset, knick-knacks went flying into walls, and there was a general feeling of atmospheric distress in the vicinity that gave rise to stories of poltergeists.

If Brodie was relatively permeable right now, he sensed it was due to sadness. Grief hung on the girl like weighted netting. Everything she saw was filtered through sadness, dread, and fear. The cause of the grief he could guess at. The fear he did not understand, but her thoughts on the matter were closed, as if she pushed them away with continual, active effort. It had to be a gargantuan task, not to think at all about something that loomed so large in her mind.

The only thought that came through clearly was that she was crazy. Then Brodie pushed that thought away too, and stumbled down the path, her mind
stubbornly empty.

“
S
EAMUS
—”

“Millie, for the last time, shut
up
!”

There was a poignant silence.

“It’s Mildred.”

Chapter Six

B
RODIE
FELT
SICK
, weighed down and nauseated, but she should have expected it. She’d been obsessing about Gramps’ death and her future, or lack of one. She hadn’t eaten much of anything over the last twenty-four hours. Gramps always said worry didn’t change anything. She tried to stop thinking about death and uncertainty, but it was not easy.

She would stop thinking about anything at all. She would concentrate on her feet, watching them, steering them, hating them. It worked fairly well. Her mind stayed empty all the way down the steep incline, across the open meadow, past the barn, and up to the house. It didn’t help much, though. Her head felt too heavy for her neck, and her gut felt jumpy and kind of squishy.

With nothing to do until the funeral the next afternoon (which she would
not
think about, would
not
!), Brodie wandered the house listlessly. Shelley was busy preparing for the guests who would come to the house after the service. She saw no sign of Briggs outside and guessed he was cleaning everyone’s cars so they’d be ready for the funeral procession. Bud was in Gramps’ office, talking to someone on the phone. Arnold hovered outside the room, obviously hoping to become useful to the new Mr. Dunbar. Arnold the Mouth was not Brodie’s favorite person. Gramps always smiled when she said that, explaining that Arnold was competent and had agreed to live in a small town west of everywhere.
Likeable
was not one of the terms in the job description. Scarlet would speak no ill of anyone in the household, but she did smile once when Brodie, told to use the word
officious
in a sentence, used it to describe her grandfather’s assistant.

As Gramps had done less and less that might be considered active work, Arnold’s role had shifted to more general duties. Arlis often pre-empted him for a day or even more, claiming she needed his help with a church or social event. Arlis considered herself the grand dame of Frankfort, hosting teas and Twelfth Night suppers and garden tours for the supposed benefit of the locals. Gramps, noting that it was all for charity, played his part when the day of each event came, allowing Arnold and Arlis to have the spotlight as his home, his property, and his money were made available to the public.

Arnold was a fake and a sneak, one of those people who thought if he smiled when he said something awful, people wouldn’t realize what a sneak he was. She had heard him on the phone sometimes (yes, she had been spying) and knew that he told stories about her, dramatizing her minor mistakes to make her seem even worse than she was. She tried not to let it bother her.

Bud finally called Arnold into the office, where they conferred for a moment. Arnold left with a folder in one hand and his car keys in the other. Brodie wondered if Arnold had said anything to Bud about her. She had glued Arnold’s shoes to the floor last year, but only with hot glue. It wasn’t like she’d used the tough stuff.

Scarlet had gone into town to find Brodie a pair of real shoes. Apparently, flip-flops were not appropriate for a funeral. When Brodie mentioned that she had a pair of Reeboks, Scarlet had given her The Look. “You have to have something nice,” she said firmly. “It’s for your grandfather.”

Brodie liked that Gramps had never explained to Scarlet—or to anyone who did not already know—that she was not really his granddaughter. Still, she hated shopping. “You go.”

“But what if the shoes I buy don’t fit?”

“I’m only going to wear them for an hour.”

Shaking her head, Scarlet had gone, leaving Brodie with nothing to do. She passed through the living room aimlessly, wondering how to keep from thinking about Gramps. The sound of crunching gravel caught her attention. The front wall was mostly windows, but Shelley had closed the blinds to keep the house cool. Pulling them aside, Brodie saw the county sheriff’s car pull into the drive. That gave her a head start to a spot where she could overhear what the deputy had to say to Bud.

S
EAMUS
SAW
THE
CAR
through Brodie’s eyes, and his interest picked up. He had to work his way to someone in authority, and here was an early opportunity. Law officers knew things he wanted to know: autopsy details, salient facts, and what witnesses had said about the incident. He wanted to jump to the deputy who now approached the house. He hoped Brodie would get close enough to allow it.

Brodie was on the move. Seamus didn’t understand her purpose until she slid under the staircase and crouched down in a shadowed recess. A hiding spot. She wanted the same thing he did, information.

The girl’s position was well-suited to eavesdropping, since the open stairway faced the office where Bud Dunbar sat sorting through old photographs. The deputy was shown in by a fifty-ish woman who moved as if her feet hurt. As he passed not four feet from them, Seamus jumped easily to him. He had a moment of misgiving at leaving Mildred behind, hoping she understood now that she could not just chat with her host at will.

The deputy was a better fit all around. Seamus preferred hosting with men—not, he told himself, because he had anything against women. He simply felt more comfortable with the male linear thought process. They spent less time considering alternatives. Instead of dithering over the best choice, they chose a path and then made it work.